Love in the Time of Maximum Controlled-Chaos

Here’s a piece of advice – if you’re planning to watch Slumdog Millionaire, the indie-sleeper-smash-hit of the year – don’t read this review. Or any other. This is a film that you’ll enjoy thoroughly even if you’ve just seen it the day before (I did) – but watching it with no knowledge of what it is about is a pleasure of a different level. For those not convinced by mere effusive (if non-specific) praise, read on and I shall do my best to get you interested in the movie without revealing too much about the plot’s highlights.

Three minutes in, Slumdog Millionaire will literally shock you into paying attention. Paying attention with your mind that is, because chances are good that you would have already averted your eyes from the screen in horror. Then faster than you can say Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the film takes off, starting with a break-neck chase through the permanent dusk of Dharavi’s gutter-alleys. In a giddy romp, exhilarating and horrifying in turn, and lasting nearly two hours and several film-years – the movie tracks the lives of three slum kids Jamal (Dev Patel), the love of his life, Latika (Freida Pinto), and his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal)– as those lives intersect, then diverge, then intersect again. And no, its nothing like Salaam Bombay.

As the three protagonists collectively jump over slum-walls and into open septic pits, escape marauding rioters in dhobi-ghaats, climb up hills one would never want to scale and fall off train roofs; take in an open-air opera in Agra before busting a nascent mujra back in Bombay; fall in with the mob, fall out with each other – director Danny Boyle reveals life in modern India as might be experienced by her marginalized masses. The film shines the light on the country’s newfound but still fragile promise and its often brutal beauty (Think of a view of the Taj Mahal with homeless kids playing on the dried-up Yamuna bed in the foreground). Boyle manages to do so without succumbing either to Hollywood’s impulse to exoticise the Orient or to Bollywood’s impulse to filter a reality that can be truly difficult to see.

Slumdog reveals every piece of grit under modern Bombay’s beautifully painted finger-nails. Dharavi looks like nothing you’ve seen before, perhaps because the film was shot in Dharavi and not on a set resembling it. Two of the child actors are actually from the slums. Yes, it leaves you in a bit of despair. But even more than that, in awe and a strange pride at the slum-dwelling Mumbaikar’s ability to love and laugh and her ability to dream in circumstances where one might perhaps imagine being able to cling to one’s humanity – but only by a thread. And it warms your heart at her ability to feel happy for someone else when they are close to winning a million bucks and a ticket out of the underclass’ collective misery.

That ticket is the million dollar jackpot available to the winner of the Indian version of the game-show Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Jamal’s getting on to the show sets the story into motion and the question-answer interludes provide the only relief from the sensory overload of the three musketeers’ adventures. The interludes last only long enough to let the host, Anil Kapoor (doing a great job of channeling Amitabh, the host of the original show) take unseemly pleasure in making fun of the Jamal’s humble origins and light of his chances. The reason behind Jamal’s presence on the show and the secrets behind his success in answering the increasingly difficult questions, power the story through to its ultimately crowd-pleasing denouement.

Slumdog is perhaps the first, and certainly the best cinematic offspring yet, of globalization. Englishman Danny Boyle who gained fame with the gritty cult hit Trainspotting led a largely non-Indian production crew to create a film set mainly in Bombay and with an ensemble cast that’s wholly of South Asian extraction. Beyond that, Boyle manages to mesh the best traditions of Hollywood – use of innovative scripts, taut drama, and slick production values - with those of Bollywood – controlled melodrama, fantastic musical score, and an ability to unabashedly tell a story about true and truly star-crossed love. Screen-writer Simon Beaufoy and composer A. R. Rahman along with Boyle have deservedly won Golden Globe nominations.

This might seem like heresy when Milk is still playing in the theaters – but if there’s only one movie you can squeeze into your packed Holiday calendar – it should be Slumdog Millionaire.